


Through a Thousand Universes

by Elliott_Fletcher



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Alternate Universe - Robin Hood, First Meetings, M/M, Marauders' Era
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-19
Updated: 2016-07-27
Packaged: 2018-07-25 11:34:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7531129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elliott_Fletcher/pseuds/Elliott_Fletcher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They're still the same people. Remus still carries dictionaries on his person. Sirius still feels the need to be the loudest person in the room. They're both still helplessly in love with each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Generosity of a Benevolent Stranger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The_Nebula](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Nebula/gifts).
  * In response to a prompt by [The_Nebula](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Nebula/pseuds/The_Nebula) in the [HPprompts](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/HPprompts) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
>  
> 
> For you wolfstar shippers out there: write about their first meeting.  
> Can be set in any universe  
> Bonus if the marauders and Lily are involved
> 
> \--Sorry no Marauders or Lily...maybe in one of the later chapters. This was a lot of fun to write, though, even without their madness; I got to learn about the era while I wrote. I hope you enjoy it, and the other chapters that will come soon (I hope...)

"Extra, extra, read all about it!" Sirius heard in the distance, faint in the bustling street. "Bellatrix Lestrange convicted of mass homicide! Extra, extra!" On and on, the young boy shouted until his voice grew hoarse, and then on again for fear of a belting.

Sirius peered all around, tilting his chin to see over monstrous, feathered hats and the lengthy necks they stood on. Across the road he thought he saw a child, malnourished with bony elbows and nose, papers in his hands, waving high in the gusts that blew debris all around. The papers rattled in the wind and threatened to escape, but the mousy boy held his grip.

"Read all about it!" he chanted, looking all around to catch the eyes of possible customers. Most ignored his mantra, but Sirius saw a man in draping cloth toss him a farthing.

"Thank you, sir, very kind, sir! Here you go, sir!" the boy beamed and gave the man his paper, and the skin of his face slid against fragile bone to show the hollow of his cheeks and sunken eyes. He looked happy, of all things, and Sirius felt for some coin in his pocket. The metal was a shock to his warm fingers, and he stirred it around before settling his gaze on the boy once more. He'd found a milk crate to stand on, and he projected to all the crowd his news like that until an old maid shooed him off. He hopped to street with an apology and paused for a bout of breath, but by then his boss had noticed, and he began to shout.

"Remus, boy, to work with you!" The man was as short as the boy--with pudgy arms and a thick neck, and all the blood was in his face and stayed there, and he wasn't the sort they called dashing, for sure. The maidens reserved that title for Sirius, himself, with his dark curls and porcelain skin, always dressed to the nine's in a silken suit, made from the Black's most valued tailor, who also sewed the gowns Belletrix Lestrange adorned.

"Yes, sir, sorry, sir," Remus bowed his head before facing the crowd once more, waving the papers with a magnanimous smile. Sirius felt the wind pick up, and with it his hair to blow into his sight, and with it Remus's papers to tumble through the street, away from the boy as he raced after them. Maybe for the feel of the wind, maybe for the pinch in his muscles--Sirius found himself running as well, his fitted pants restraining the brunt of his movement so he was not nearly as agile as should be a boy. His blood pounded through him as his feet smacked the ground, and he kept his eyes trained to the small back in the distance, steadily closer, closer still, until Sirius felt his shirt on his fingertips. He reached and grasped and clenched into the fabric of Remus's vest and held him still to Remus's protest, but he was smaller than Sirius, so much bonier than skinny Sirius.

"Wotcher? I need those papers, sir, please release me," Remus's voice was surprisingly quiet, as his shouted mantras would not imply, and it was hoarse from overuse, and it was cracking from a raising age. "Please, sir."

Sirius shook his head, and another gust carried the papers out of sight, and lifted his dark, curling hair from his shoulders and Remus's cap from his head. Remus brought it down with nimble fingers, and the skin of his arms rippled to expose some pinching scars. Sirius dug around his deep, filled pocket once more and retrieved a handful of metal coin, and he watched carefully as Remus's dim, hazel eyes lit from behind. The reason why lost itself within Remus's mind, for only a fool would question the benevolence of a wealthy man.

"A pocket?" Sirius asked, his eyes searching the expanse of countenance front of him. Cheeks with scars and little freckles presented themselves to him, and yet they hid so well against the boy's soot-smeared complexion.

"No, sir, not a pocket they won't search," Remus answered, his mouth a slight agape, but Sirius could not fault him for it. Their mouths both turned to frown, and their brows mirrored each other in furrowed concentration. The wind picked everything up once more, and Sirius was drawn to the thread-bare cap Remus caught between his fingers.

"That's it!" Sirius declared, and Remus shrunk into himself at the abrupt. His senses sprung to wild as he noticed traits about the man who must have once looked kind. The calmer curls were hectic and loud, and the Nobleman in front him could not be more a child himself: his face devoid of superfluities, and his eyes chasing every movement made within the mile.

"That's what?" Remus ventured, and he stepped himself away from the mad-looking Sirius, who's eyes were as dark as a wild dog's. "I ought to fetch those papers now. . . . "

"No!" Sirius grabbed the thin bone of Remus's wrist, and his fingers pressed hard into giving flesh. Remus's everything was alarmed by these outbursts, and he pried himself away from Sirius's bruising touch with haste. "You have to take the coin!"

"I told you I don't have any pocket!" Remus's voice raised with his posture until his spine lay straight and his chin pointed level with the musty ground cover.

"Your cap, Remus! Tear a hole in your cap!" He exclaimed to the air with conviction as if this answer was the most obvious around, and Remus wondered the sanity of the nearly-man, and wherever had he learned his name?

With wary eyes, Remus removed his cap and took the knife held out to him. His fingers trembled still while he incised the worn fabric, and steadied only when the knife had removed itself from his hands. The cap was taken from him by a serene man whom took the earlier man's place, and Remus looked to eyes that no longer held deep angst.

Sirius filled the cavity with shimmering, clinking coin, and the hat weighed more than the boy when filled. He wondered how this fortune fell upon him, and he thanked the Nobleman who'd graced him.

"My deepest gratitude, sir, means much to me," said Remus.

Sirius dismissed him with a hand before bending low to bow to him. "Sirius Black, Robin Hood of London. Pleasure to make your acquaintance."

Remus took aback with widened eyes and a bobbing throat, but bowed as well once Sirius had straightened. What fortune had he stumbled past indeed! With a curt cough to clear a stutter, Remus introduced himself as he'd seen the men around him do. "Remus Lupin, property of Fenrir Greyback. Pleasure--"

"Remus, boy, get back here now or it's fifty lashings, boy!"

Remus clutched his head and grit his teeth with a horrid sound, and turned on a scuffed heel to run back to where his boss had called. Sirius grabbed his shoulder, quick, to catch him before he sprinted 'way, and Remus's head whipped back around with a vexed mouth that stretched his skin.

"I must be off, but thank you, sir," said Remus, only a tad harsher than another grateful man would be.

"We'll meet again, Remus," said Sirius, and he knocked the brim of Remus's full cap down into his eyes, and with an equal glare Remus shook his hand away.

"We'll meet again," Remus repeated as his feet smacked the ground, and as his muscles pinched, and as the wind blew his hair into flight, and as the stare of a Nobleman graced his back, and as the lost paper's blew themselves into a long-away puddle, he forgot about the lashings and thought only of another meeting, another chance, another life. _We'll meet again._


	2. A Lone Birch Tree

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Remus-was-a-tree AU which in actuality is only slightly less confusing then it originally sounds.

The first thing I know when all the pain subsides is that nothing is as it was, and even if I wished for it to be, I wouldn't have the power any longer to make that wish a truth. I wonder absently if this ghostly boy would have the power, and I look to the landscape with awe, for a tree does not have such freedom, and when all you've ever known is green and grass and bark, and you are presented with a being like a boy, your mind becomes quite flabbergasted, and then so do you.

"Did it really work?" He asks in looping lilts, and then he steps closer with moving things and limbs that are not made of tree but skin and nail and hair, dark hair.

"Did what really work?" Asks I, and the voice that breaks through the opening in my newly born face is beautiful, crisp, light in my ears, these holes I've never had before.

"You're real—I did it!" He gestures wildly with clenched fists in fits of triumph and other things, and then his eyes, dark and wild, are lit from inside. He steps, he steps, and then he's there, procuring his hand to hold my own, and flesh is soft and not scratchy, and not hard at all but smooth, and I quite like the feeling of hands holding hands. I'm weightless in seconds and then I'm a tonne, and I wobble and shake on these feet I've not known.

"Sirius Black," says he, with wild hair and eyes that curl and wave like leaves on a twig. "You're from the birch tree, yes? I did manage to transfigure you, I hope."

I look to behind, and there is a space where I once lived in ignorance to this fascinating life. The spot is hollow and dark in the moonlight, and full like that orb in the sky which lights up the features I don't want to see.

"Do you have a name?" Asks he, and he removes his cloak from his back and offers the cloth to me. I look on in ponderous thought, and when my eyes shift to his hands, they're around me, and cloth that was once his is mine and on me and there, keeping my bare skin warm as he hides me from the night in cotton.

I shake my head like I shook my limbs, and the teeth on his face spread wide in a grin. He points to the sky with eager fingers and holds my gaze with sanguine eyes.

"Pick a star," he says, his eyes as bright as the sun-filled night. "I'll name you after it," and he holds his arms around me: we fit.

I raise a lengthened knuckle then a finger then a nail, and then he tells me that I'm Remus, a lonely wolf and not a tree at all, I think.

I wonder how it is that easy, how life can start with a wave of wand, and later maybe I'll regret it, maybe later I'll forget that even though I'm human now, I did start out a lone birch tree:

This is how I came to be.


	3. The Other End of the Line

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Radio AU - "And then he hears it, faint in the crackle of air waves where most everyone can hear it but only he is listening: a message meant for him."

"Tango Alpha Three, Tango Alpha Three, this is Tango Alpha Five," Remus repeats into the radio, "Come in, over." Each word resounds with more urgency than the last, and soon he's pulling on curls and hairs, and frustration seeps from his pores in a way he's never known before. "Come in, over." And then he sits and waits, and he spins in his chair and straightens crooked cuffs, and he holds his head in his hands like he isn't fragile, isn't nearly as broken as he feels. And then he hears it, faint in the crackle of air waves where most everyone can hear it but only he is listening: a message meant for him.

"Tango Alpha Five, this is Tango Alpha Three, Stand-by, Over," and the voice is a beautiful one, with a thousand inflections and dips and drops, and it's warm and accented and not from here, Remus can tell. Remus rubs his arms and wipes the grin on his face with the back of his hand, and then he straightens straight cuffs and fixes his disheveled curls, and he tucks them under a scratchy hat that makes his ears itch, and it's then that he hears that voice again. "Radio check, over."

Remus explodes from his eyes to his stomach, to all the blood in his veins that boils, and to his legs which sleep with a thousand prickles, and someone is here, someone is listening, someone cares. "Read you loud and clear, over."

"Go ahead, Tango Alpha Five," This voice is so clearly male, so clearly human, and Remus thinks it's the perfect voice for radio.

"What are your coordinates, Tango Alpha Five? Over." Remus grips the table with whitened knuckles and blotchy skin, and he looks to the map covered in thumb tacks, covered in people, and he thinks that none could be as great as this one, and he can imagine himself pressing that silver pin into any number of expanse, and it makes his heart race and his hands sweat.

"Five Three Point Four Eight Zero Eight North," he says slowly, and Remus rubs his fingers together eagerly. He stares at the map like it holds all the answers, but it's just paper taped to a wall in the attic, and it's never been anything more. "Two Point Two Four Two Six West, over."

"Stand-by, over," Remus removes the headset gingerly, and turns in his chair with dancing feet, and his socks wriggle with his toes, and he walks past the burgundy rug, and past the boxes filled with china, and then he's standing in front of it, searching with eyes behind glasses that cover the half of his face. England, he sees, after indefinite seconds, and his heart thrums as he reaches for the pin jar. He pricks his hand on the tin metal and holds a yellow tack between his thumb and fore finger, and he feels power in his veins and in his nerves, and it stings with the tang of the blood running down his knuckle.

He blinks and he's back again, sitting in the chair with the headset in his hands. He fits it over his ears and they block out the sounds of the world for a second, and all he hears is the static of the other end of the line. "Roger, over."

"What is your name, Tango Alpha Five? Over." Remus hears after a while of staring at his hands. It's mellow and wonderful, and he's quick to answer.

"Remus," he whispers once, and then he holds his finger over the black button, and then he pushes it and says it into the mic. "What is your name, Tango Alpha Three? Over." And then he waits in the silence and dust motes for an answer he knows will come.

"Sirius, over." He hears, and then he tries it out on his tongue until he can picture the letters in his mind and trace them with his eyes shut.

"Thank you, Sirius, over and out." Remus wipes his face with his hands and pushes away from the radio. It is as he goes to take the headset off that he hears the response so sincere.

"No, thank you, Remus. You have helped me. Over and out."


End file.
